Strict and Fair Commander

The witness said that he had never heard from his colleagues from the VRS Main Headquarters that Mladic ordered or war involved in the murder of Muslim captives from Srebrenica.

The indictment charges General Mladic with genocide against about 7,000 Srebrenica Muslims, whom the VRS captured and shot after having occupied the UN protected enclave on July 11, 1995.
When asked by Defence attorney Branko Lukic to describe Ratko Mladic, as a soldier and man, Milovanovic said:

“Mladic was a charismatic man, a giant with a gentle heart, which means that he was not a grudge-bearer. He was a strict and fair commander, who protected his subordinates.”

Prosecutor Dermot Groome dedicated the most part of the additional examination to proving that, when he issued his order in late March 1995, Mladic did not annul, but complemented the Directive no. 7, under which Supreme Commander Radovan Karadzic ordered the VRS to create “an unbearable situation of complete uncertainty without hope for further survival and life of the local population” in Srebrenica.

Milovanovic said previously that Karadzic’s Directive was unlawful, adding that Mladic omitted the order to create “an impossible situation” for survival of civilians from his order.

The witness stuck to his allegation that he had neither seen Karadzic’s Directive nor Mladic’s order until 2007, despite the fact that he confirmed that he distributed the Directive no. 7 to subordinated units via couriers.

Milovanovic confirmed that, in his book about the Bosnian war he wrote that “Serb forces did something that they should not have done” in Srebrenica and that “no military excuse could be found for that.”

Following Milovanovic’s examination, prosecutors presented engineer Milomir Soja to judges as a new witness. Soja described the work on launchers of modified air-bombs, which the VRS used on the Sarajevo battlefield in 1994 and 1995.

Soja said that he attended the launching of one air bomb, which did not reach its target in Sarajevo, but exploded too early in the city area under the Muslim control.

He specified that he heard the sound of launching of “five or six” such bombs.

Mladic is charged with terrorising civilians in Sarajevo through long-lasting shelling and sniping attacks, persecuting Muslims and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina and taking UNPROFOR members hostage.

The trial of Mladic before The Hague Tribunal is due to continue on Monday, September 23.